Not exactly the voice inside your head

A Sign of the Times: Doomsday Seed Vault

The BBC does a good job explaining exactly how this seed vault will work.

The vault is intended to act as insurance so that food production can be restarted anywhere on Earth after a regional or global catastrophe.

Built deep inside a mountain, the structure will eventually house a vast collection of seeds; safeguarding world crops against possible future disasters including nuclear wars and dangerous climate change.

It does say a lot about our species that we can rationalize so well our problems that we create a doomsday deus ex machina to save our ability to make food at the same time as we destroy our food.

In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, one of his students poses this question in regard to the Easter Island inhabitants who used all of their trees to create statues when their food supply was dependent on trees:

“What went through the mind of the person who cut down that last tree?”